My recent diary expressed the view I hold that the bullying bullhorn and gun-held evacuation going on in the city right now is designed to clear the city in order to “hide” the dead.
My instincts tell me there will be mass burials, with bodies being transported possibly outside of the city to be disposed of.
THe numbers of dead will be deliberately reduced.
The excuse of disease will be used for these mass burials.
Whole families have probably drowned, and, families are now spread so far apart that they will be ineffective in searching for their loved ones left behind.
When there is no one to speak up for the dead, the dead disappear.
Mayor Nagin is predicting a 5 to 10,000 body count. I believe he is underestimating the numbers of people that chose not to leave. In any event, a 4000 body count, for example, would have people saying that it “could have been much worse”.
With New Orleans residents scattered everywhere now with few resources, it will be difficult for them to lobby for their loved ones left behind.
Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, said on Meet the Press today that FEMA deliberately cut their emergency phone lines. I found this blog site with some info on the “jamming” of communications. I can’t verify any of this of course, but we must document this so that it can be investigated later.
Hearing one of our political leaders state that FEMA cut their emergency phone lines could be a turning point in exposing the agency for what it is: a bureaucracy mostly concerned with its own survival, and the survival of the powers that be that created it.
Given FEMA’s gross negligence and ineptitude, there is a very good reason to stop the flow of information.
And then, what better way to stop the flow of information than to empty the city of its last remaining residents, the “citizen observers” of this tragedy.
I know people holed up in their homes, some in the French Quarter which is high and dry, willing to stay to help in the cleanup and care of people and animals left behind. I know of people wanting to return as soon as possible to help also.
There are many reasons for hiding the numbers of dead: the more dead, the worse this administration looks, not that they need anymore deadly window dressing, what with the blood of thousands of Iraqis and Americans on their hands.
THink about it. Have we gotten any sort of count of Iraqi dead from this group of sanctioned killers?
The more dead, the more compensation to pay the families of the dead. The more dead, the more explaining of failed policies.
New Orleans is now the City of the Dead. I pray that she won’t become the City of the Disappearing Dead.
Update [2005-9-5 9:15:57 by duranta]: From contact with those still in the French Quarter, apparently the forced evacuations are heavily concentrated, at least for now, in the poor sections of the city. That is where most of the bodies are, and where there may be some still waiting to be rescued who are too weak to call for help.
This “rescue” operation has largely been a case of neighbors helping neighbors. There will be more deaths now if everyone is forced out.
BTW, I tried to update this diary last night at 2:00 am and was unable to access this site for 45 minutes. I finally gave up and went to bed. I had no trouble accessing any other site.
From that email on the evacuation targeting the poor:
Today has been insane and emotional, but I am happy to report that the
evacuation is not as drastic as it first appeared to be and we are much more
positive about our chances of getting into New Orleans.
After I sent out this morning’s update, I received a call from a friend letting
me know that he had just spoken to another friend, Mike, who is in the French
Quarter – and that no such thing was happening in the French Quarter. So the
good news is that these evacuations are not taking place throughout the city of
New Orleans. The bad news is that, yet again, it appears that the poorest,
mostly African-American neighborhoods are being targeted for this ‘special
treatment.’
I confirmed reports about the French Quarter myself when I spoke to Mike this
evening. The quarter is pretty quiet, and a group of 4 men there are cooking for
people at an evacuated hotel. Mike says they work in teams of two – two men stay
and cook while the other two run back to Missouri for more supplies. He says
this is the first relief in the form of food they have had – from a grassroots
operation, of course.
Update [2005-9-5 16:49:53 by duranta]:From WWLTV.com:
10:12: A.M. – Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard: I’m not surprised at what the feds say, they’re covering their butts. They’re keeping the body counts down because they don’t want to horrify the nation. It’s worse than Iraq, worse than 9-11. They just don’t want to know how many were murdered by bureaucracy.
10:10 A.M. – Broussard: I know what the body count is so far, but I won’t horrify the nation.
“Magnitude” of the storm was “lingering” Cat 3, or Cat 4.
Source: ASCE Online, June 2003.
rba, have I been receiving emails from you? I remember seeing your initials, but for some reason those emails always landed in my junk folder. Sorry for the mistaken identity if it wasn’t you.
Are you trying to get into the city? Is it even possible without some kind of official clearance? I gather you are a resident. Are they letting residents back in?
The french quarter is high ground, so I believe is most of Uptown. If you are southern, you know that the poor always occupy the low ground in all urban southern cities and the wealthy the high ground.
Isnt that why the poor are being evacuated first? Do you really believe what you are saying?
Please reply to my questions since you are one of few connected to the scene. Thanks
Yes, the poor usually occupy the lower parts of the city. However, as stated in my other diary, big black cadillacs were driving through neighborhoods with men with bullhorns and guns demanding that people leave, yet these same cars have not been seen in the French Quarter. If cars were in these neighborhoods, obviously they weren’t flooded. Not every poor neighborhood, or rich, in the city was flooded. Parts of the uptown areas weren’t flooded, as wasn’t the garden district.
Illusions of magic, this is obviously all speculation on my part. I speculate because I suspect. FEMA botched the rescue efforts, badly, and caused deaths. People are still dying as we speak.
This lead me to the conclusion that they may try to cover their mistakes to some extent. This could include the mass disposal of bodies.
I hope I am wrong.
Yeah, sent you a couple early on. Didn’t realize you were in the midst of it. Reply if and when you have time.
.
No humanity for the innocent – just collateral damage – the dead need not be counted. The poor and elderly of NOLA have no homes, who will miss them, who will collect their body when they pass away?
Hurricane Katrina victims rest as they wait for evacuation at Algier's Point in New Orleans, La. AP Photo/Rick BowmerNEW ORLEANS AP – 1 minute ago — Thousands more bedraggled refugees were bused and airlifted to salvation, leaving the heart of New Orleans to the dead and dying, the elderly and frail stranded too many days without food, water or medical care.
No one knows how many were killed by Hurricane Katrina’s floods and how many more succumbed waiting to be rescued. But the bodies are everywhere: hidden in attics, floating among the ruined city, crumpled on wheelchairs, abandoned on highways.
And the dying goes on — at the convention center and an airport triage center, where bodies were kept in a refrigerated truck.
Gov. Kathleen Blanco said that she expected the death toll to reach the thousands. And Craig Vanderwagen, rear admiral of the U.S. Public Health Service, said one morgue alone, at a St. Gabriel prison, expected 1,000 to 2,000 bodies.
[…] Nearby, a woman lay dead in a wheelchair on the front steps. A man was covered in a black drape with a dry line of blood running to the gutter, where it had pooled. Another had lain on a chaise lounge for four days, his stocking feet peeking out from under a quilt.
By mid-afternoon, only pockets of stragglers remained in the streets around the convention center, and New Orleans paramedics began carting away the dead.
A once-vibrant city of 480,000 people, overtaken just days ago by floods, looting, rape and arson, was now an empty, sodden tomb. The exact number of dead won’t be known for some time. Survivors were still being plucked from roofs and shattered highways across the city.
“There are people in apartments and hotels that you didn’t know were there,” Army Brig. Gen. Mark Graham said.
The overwhelming majority of those stranded in the post-Katrina chaos were those without the resources to escape — and, overwhelmingly, they were black.
You believe Bush | Cheney will make an effort to make their true failure known to the nation? Due to Health hazard, damaged blocks of NOLA will be razed to the ground :: Nero loves to see Rome burn.
A U.S. Coast Guard vessel heads south on the Mississippi River past a fire on the east side of New Orleans, La. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, firefighters say they will let the fire burn itself out. AP Photo/Eric Gay▼ ▼ ▼ HAVE YOU READ MY DIARY YET? ▼ ▼ ▼
In your spare time….. trying to put together information, would like to connect [need help]. Send e-mail to below address. thanks.
I have had similar concerns. I believe that there will be an attempt to skew the numbers myself. I was speaking with my husband about it yesterday. There may be one saving grace having the National Guard involved. They don’t tend to be thoughtlessly loyal to any administration and they aren’t required to be. If people in the Guard do things that leave a bad taste in their mouth they are much freer and more likely to make those things publicly known.
Excellent point. Ultimately though, won’t FEMA be in charge of the body count? That’s akin to the fox in the hen house. I wonder if Nagin and Blanco are savy enough to demand observers of this.
According to NPR they are setting up a morgue in the country about 60 miles out of NOLA. Complete with a small gravel road leading to it. The fellow running it supposedly has some experience and there are others who are now going to start collecting the bodies. The plan is to grid the area and go house to house. Supposedly they have been to St. Bernard’s (remember the mother in the nursing home?) and only 15 bodies were found there. The fellow said “Don’t exaggerate the counts!”
Considering the bio-hazard cocktail that some of the bodies have been in since over a week ago, there may not be much left! They claim they will do DNA testing on the bodies.
Are they allowing reporters to stay there? The reporters that have been so vocal this week, Anderson especially need to be there when they start piling up the bodies. Someone other than government “officials” MUST count the bodies. How can we make that happen? They will try to spin a news blackout with the threat of diease.
It is heartening to hear that many stubborn residents are refusing to leave. This will hamper any efforts at cover-up.
Also, the very stubborn Aaron Broussard, President of Jefferson Parish, is allowing residents back in today to check their properties. My sister and father are there as we speak rescuing our cats, who are fine, btw.
By Thursday, residents of Jefferson Parish will be allowed to come and go as they please. This will allow, hopefully, more of an influx back into Orleans Parish, if only a trickle.
Also, with Broussard and Sheriff Harry Lee continually on the scene in Jefferson Parish, not to mention Nagin in New Orleans, this could hamper any effort to dispose of bodies.
I said they would probably try to dispose of bodies before the count. They may not necessarily succeed though.
All is not lost.
Good Luck to you Duranta.
So you can get into the city?
What is going on though with these rescue efforts in the homes. Are there more boats than before. Democracy now reporters said as of Saturday there were hardly any boats resucing people. Why don’t they have divers going in there looking for people who cant’ swin to the door?
The streets should be littered with boats looking for people.
This is still so damn unbelievable.
The new is turning agaisnt us coverage is diminishing and Bush is reportedly not being blamed. I know why.
Nobody cares about black people and nobody cares about white people who live around black people. Nobody in power that is.And a lot of Christian Americans that support this creature that passes for …I can’t say the word….President
Absolutely that there should be a coordinated flotilla of boats to rescue people. The waterways should be teaming with boats with a feasible, logistical plan. I continue to see pictures and it seems just from that there are almost no boats in the water..or they are volunteers who have taken it upon themselves to get out and rescue people.
And I absolutely believe that the body count will be covered up and/or blamed on the local/state responses.
Poor people don’t count and if they are poor black people that magnifies the don’t care attitude.
I just read this on Raw Story confirming everything you are saying
Jefferson Parish President: ‘I’m not surprised at what the feds say, they’re covering their butts. They’re keeping the body counts down because they don’t want to horrify the nation. It’s worse than Iraq, worse than 9-11. They just don’t want to know how many were murdered by bureaucracy.
http://www.rawstory.com
MSNBC reported the local coroner as saying there were more than a thousand dead in Biloxi, but the “official” count for all of Mississippi remains in the hundreds.
WTF?
To let these people go on wondering whether their loved ones are living or dead is cruel beyond words. Can you imagine after 9/11 anyone suggesting that no effort be made to identify victims?
Whatever it takes, every family deserves to know.
Well hell we can’t go count all those poor people floatin out to sea— <BITTER BITTER GRIN>
10,000 dead in New Orleans alone. My estimate is around 15,000 right now. There could be at least that many die of starvation and disease.
The American South. Congo. Rawanda. Sudan. Bosnia. Iraq. Cambodia.
If we don’t see it and we can’t number it, we can continue with a quick, “Tsk,tsk, what a shame.” With the heartfelt singing of a quick hymn or two. With a check to our favorite charity. After that we can distract ourselves with shopping or “Survivor.”
We can stuff down the real grief and horror until it comes seeping out in some other toxic way. Most significantly, we can avoid asking hard questions and doing the hard work needed to make sure that something “like this” never happens again.
Is that there will be no accurate accounting of the dead. Also, it seems to me a fortunate coincidence for the administration that the woeful response to this disaster will also help cover up any distinction between those who died because of the hurricane, and those who died because of the failed emergency response. Something tells me that the Bush administration really doesn’t want to see that number.